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Re: Problem finding telephonenumber in a plain numeric search when number is stored with special characters



--On Sunday, August 28, 2005 5:23 PM +0200 Michael StrÃder <michael@stroeder.com> wrote:

Pierangelo Masarati wrote: 
Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:

I think an approx matching rule would be better, that can match any
way we want it to without breaking the standard.

What about matching numbers with or without the international code,
including those cases where the number without international code must
be prefixed with "0"?  e.g. "+49 (123) 45678" should match "4912345678"
__and__ "012345678".  We had this pattern in Italy for some time; now
fortunately the leading "0" must be always present, even with the
international code.  I think many other countries still have the intl.
code/leading 0 game, and I'm pretty sure those that allow fancy chars in
telephone numbers also pretend these two numbers to be treated as
synonyms.


IMHO that's not feasible. I remember Spain to have another prefix schema
for wide area calls (9?).

I once wrote a phone number sanitizer function in Python which tries to
normalize all presentation forms commonly used here in Germany (also
prefix 0). It got pretty messy though and it's not applicable to what I
see for e.g. US phone number.

For Stanford, phone numbers are our second largest nightmare (after generating cn values for people across all possible names without creating duplicates. :P). There's not just the issue of proper formatting, what also comes up for us is the fact that people get to enter their phone numbers into a web application, and you get very interesting things like "N-ONE". :P

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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